Having marked their 10th anniversary at the top of British dance music with a greatest hits collection, it would be easy to write the Chemical Brothers off in a genre that requires a certain freshness. However, Push the Button is a spectacular jump back to the top of their game, intensified by the rise of dance music in 2005. First single and opening track, "Galvanize", features Q-tip on vocals. It's a little more downtempo than the brothers of late as they got wrapped up in a need to produce a dancefloor killer to match the heady days of "Hey Boy, Hey Girl"-it's not too different, not too clever, but has enough of the necessary "oomph" to make it an excellent start to the album. In terms of classic sounding tracks, there are "Come Inside" and "The Big Jump", the former a big-beat spectacular and the latter a definite tune to be heard "out", replete with enormous slidey bassline and sticky acid stabs. A standout in a similar vein to "Galvanize" (although possibly better) is "Left Right" featuring Anwar Superstar. It's got a bold hip-hop swagger and politically charged lyrics over a chunky riff that wouldn't sound out of place in a seventies TV cop show. There are only two of the customary chillout tracks (think Beth Orton), there's "Hold tight London", an upbeat soca-styled song that's okay but not nearly as beautiful as sweeping epic "Close Your Eyes" featuring the Magic Numbers. Closing Push the Button are two more guitar-based tracks, the country-rocking loop of "Marvo Ging" and the brilliant mish-mash of styles that is "Surface to Air", a sort of rapturous amalgam of the brothers' own "Golden Path", the Strokes and festival favourites Dreadzone. A fantastic end to a consistent album that easily outshines its predecessor, Come with Us, and will hopefully herald a great year for electronic music. [+]

Parts of the Process tracks the career of one of British music's least-sung success stories. When Morcheeba first emerged in 1996, they were bracketed with the trip-hoppers, very much in the slipstream of the Bristol crew represented by Massive Attack and Tricky. Yet their fortunes contrasted with those of most trip-hoppers: trip-hop is a supposedly languid, easy-grooving genre, but its major practitioners have proved surprisingly volatile, prone to internal feuds and catastrophic slumps or liable simply to evaporate altogether, like Portishead. Morcheeba, on the other hand, with a quiet stealth that is the mark of their music, managed to garner a significant worldwide following, even touring China. Morcheeba are a trio featuring brothers Paul and Ross Godfrey (whose backgrounds were in prog-rock and deejaying) and vocalist Skye Edwards. Their music is a seemingly effortless blend of influences from soul to hippy and rock to pop. It's smooth and beguiling, dark and beige by turns-no more so than on "Trigger Hippie". Without missing a beat, they are also able to incorporate guest artists such as rapper Big Daddy Kane on "What's Your Name" and Lambchop's Kurt Wagner on "What New York Couples Fight About". This is a fine compilation, but it's a shame that it's missing the title track from their debut album Who Can You Trust. -David Stubbs.

The Chemical Brothers released their third album with their status as one of the UK's most exciting bands unassailable. Surrender, managed to enhance their already burgeoning reputation, drawing on the talents of a formidable array of celebrity collaborators including Missy Elliott, Oasis' Noel Gallagher and Bernard Sumner. The Brothers shifted their attention away from hip-hop breaks towards more traditional 4/4 beats, but their unique blend of visceral energy, inventive melodies and eclectic samples remained unaffected. "Out Of Control", featuring the fragile vocals of Sumner, sounds like New Order on stronger drugs, before erupting into a groovy, guitar-studded monster not dissimilar to many of Underworld's offerings. The fairytale chords and Oriental chimes of "Sunshine Underground" provide a refreshing change in direction, while Mercury Rev's Jonathan Donahue makes a refreshing appearance on the psychedelic rock finale, "Dream On". Surrender is a deeply satisfying album from a band who grow from strength to strength. -Ed Potton.

As anyone who's heard their exuberant debut album will tell you, Lemon Jelly are no ordinary chill-out act. Here the eccentric duo present their second full-length outing Lost Horizons, and it's every bit as good as their acclaimed debut, Lemonjelly. ky. Inhabiting a world of almost limitless playfulness, Nick Franglen and Fred Deakin make the sort of brassy, beautiful downtempo music that leaves the listener desperately trying to suppress a goofy grin. You see, Lost Horizons is that rarest of things: a focused, humorous and exciting chill-out album that stands up to repeat listens. Often this kind of tongue-in-cheek chillage can sound dull and contrived (or, worse, sickly and overbearing), but Lost Horizons is anything but tedious. It simply bristles with shimmering, sunny instrumentation (jaunty acoustic guitars, skippy beats, tinkling pianos, oh-so English brass band fanfares… even the odd harp), while quirky, oddball samples lurk round every turn ("Nice Weather For Ducks", for example, is a country-funk shakedown based around a sample from a children's nursery rhyme). From the percussive space jazz of "Return to Patagonia" to the seductive, sleepy closer "The Curse of Ka'zar", Lost Horizons doesn't so much glimmer, it positively shines. 2002's best downtempo album? Almost certainly. -Matt Anniss.

Pop wannabe Finley Quaye emerged from nowhere in 1997 with this debut and claimed to be Tricky's Uncle, much to the latter's disgruntlement. After the commercial and critical success of Maverick A Strike, however, it was a moot point as to whether Tricky would be best known as Finley Quaye's nephew. Maverick A Strike's success was probably down to its providing a rare antidote to the morbid, noir- ish obsessions of contemporaries like Massive Attack; Quaye's vocals are as up, sunny and fresh as the first breath of Spring. Even the downbeat notes struck in the lyrics of "Even After All" and "Ride On And Turn The People On" can't cloud the shining reggae rush of this album, given innumerable citrus twists and techno turns by producers Jonathan Quarmby and Kevin Bacon, held together by a band who demonstrated live their ability to match tightness with a lightness of touch on the likes of "It's Great When We're Together" and "Sweet And Loving Man". -David Stubbs.

To follow up their bombastic 1995 album Exit Planet Dust, the Chemical Brothers fine-tuned their bombastic beats and produced a rock-solid pop album (pun intended). Dig Your Own Hole finds the common ground between rock & roll and techno, both in spirit and substance. Singles like "Block Rockin' Beats," "Elektrobank," and "Setting Sun" (featuring vocals by Oasis's Noel Gallagher) may lack the big hair and pomposity of rock music, but they make up for it in spades, with sampled and real guitars battling for space with sirens and distorted hip-hop drums. The album reeks of pure enthusiasm and energy, evoking a crowd-pleasing exuberance that makes Dig Your Own Hole a Back in Black for the late 1990s. Pure stadium techno. -Matthew Corwine.

Melody AM, the debut from Norwegian outfit Royksopp, is widely being touted for "classic" status. Far from "just another chill-out" album, this is a richly textured feast of warm, late-night food for the soul. The songs seem to reflect the extremes of the environment they were produced in-the sorrowful "She's So", a tribute to almost 24-hour winter darkness of Royksopp's motherland, and the lilting warmth of "Royksopp's Night Out", a literal dance in the midnight sun. In the tradition of bands such as Air and Groove Armada, this is a sound that could almost make it to the dance floor-if it could bear to leave the comfort of the sofa behind. The infectious "Poor Leno" hints at what their dance productions (and they do exist) might sound like, and as a whole, Melody AM will leave you wanting to get your hands on anything and everything else "the 'Sopp" have ever touched. -Ruby Tuesday.

"All pop music begins with Kraftwerk", it has been said-and, indeed, the 1970s experiments in minimalist electronics on the part of these four reclusive and bourgeois-looking young Dusseldorf men were directly responsible for the electrified landscape of subsequent decades of rock, pop and dance music. The album is dominated by its 22-minute title track, a beautiful electronic simulation of a motorway journey, from cranking up the engine to bowling along grey lanes cutting a swathe through the countryside, swerving and hooting the horn. Kraftwerk were prefiguring music's next step into the machine age but the antipathy they aroused in 1974 exposed the deluded Luddite tendencies of the pre-punk critical establishment who felt that music could only remain "real" by remaining as close to "nature" as possible. Kraftwerk slyly undermined this notion. After Kraftwerk, pop music would echo, not reject the sounds and rhythms of modern life. -David Stubbs.

Masters of reinvention, rave stalwarts The Prodigy have undergone another remarkable facelift for their fourth album, Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned. For band leader Liam Howlett, this mutation was less about ambitious experimentation and more the result of crucial damage control: the band's disastrous 2002 comeback campaign, spearheaded by "Baby's Got a Temper" found the band stagnant and on the verge of self-parody. Howlett's response was to scrap the sessions, hunker down with a laptop and hammer out an album that held spontaneity as a virtue. And while the old touchstones-the propulsive breakbeats of old-skool hip-hop, the brooding menace of punk-rock and acid-house-are all here sporting a fresh chrome gleam, here they're joined by new influences: everything from crunk hip-hop to Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker" bubbles beneath the surface of "Girls". Maxim and Keith Flint are absent, replaced by a bizarre roll call of stars-Liam Gallagher, Juliette Lewis, Twista-and obscurities… anyone remember the Ping Pong Bitches? Not that it matters: this is Howlett's album, and whether he's rewiring Shocking Blue's "Love Buzz" as Middle Eastern-tinged acid techno on "Phoenix" or clashing with Kool Keith on "Wake Up Call", he sounds back on top of his game. -Louis Pattison.

When Danny DeVito commissioned Irish producer David Holmes to provide the score for the film Out of Sight, he chose wisely. Holmes's gritty, urban dance music, first exposed on the sadly underrated The Film's Crap Let's Slash the Seats, is perfect for evoking scenes and atmospheres, yet it's interesting enough to stand on its own. For this album, Holmes and a friend wandered the streets of New York, collecting voices and noises; Holmes then assembled them into an imaginary soundtrack with the structures of modern dance music and the sonic qualities of rock and dub reggae. Let's Get Killed is a disjointed cut-up session that brings the grit and excitement of city life into your living room without leaving a drop of blood. -Matthew Corwine.

Talkie Walkie comes five years after their landmark Moon Safari and Parisian mood-enhancers Air are back doing what they do best. Famously shy of ever repeating themselves, JB Dunckel and Nicolas Godin have filled in the years with the poorly received follow-up, 10,000hz Legend (even they think it strange), and an eerily effective soundtrack to Sofia Coppola's Virgin Suicides. Nice enough in their own niche way, but a far cry from what people actually wanted. Happily, Talkie Walkie reunites us with the Air that we love: two hopelessly indulgent romantics with an ear in the past and an eye on the future. It's meltingly good stuff-a collection of cool, cosmic pop songs that dispense with notions of time and space, wallowing instead on a cloud of poignant psychedelia. With vocal duties this time taken by the boys themselves, and gorgeously fragile strings courtesy of Serge Gainsbourg collaborator, Michel Colombier, they get off to a good start. Perhaps the introduction of an outside producer, in this case Radiohead's Nigel Godrich, has forced such beautifully measured focus? Whatever, touchy-feely epics such as the heavenly "Cherry Blossom Girl" sit well next to electronic masterpieces such as "Ran", whose enveloping tracked vocals recall the 10cc classic "I'm Not in Love". -Paul Tierney.

You might expect the debut album from a woman who has collaborated extensively with Tricky and Orbital to be both wondrous and strange-and you'd be right to. What you might not expect is quite the depth of Alison Goldfrapp's beguiling, distracting 21st-Century noir visions on Felt Mountain. She and her fellow composer Will Gregory can mix in Brechtian cabaret, classical instrumentation, left-of-field electronics, decadent Gainsbourg-style French pop and the odd piece of whistling on just one track ("Felt Mountain"). "Oompa Radar" almost reaches Tom Waits heights of infamy, the way familiar instruments come together in such a simultaneously comforting and alienating style. The baroque "Paper Bag", meanwhile, uncannily recalls Joe Meek's toytown visions of 1960's grandeur. All this, and a seductive vocal to die for. -Everett True.

Lemon Jelly is a new addition to the pantheon of leftfield downtempo classics, a group to file alongside Air, Kid Loco and every Café Del Mar album so far. Lemonjelly. ky is actually a collection of the Lemon Jelly duo's three EPs so far. This album echoes with the ghosts of lost 1950s easy listening icons, plundering some of the daftest samples this side of a De La Soul record, rippling with a lavish, sun-kissed tropical aura. This is music so special you'll want to throw open all your windows every time you hear it. There's a wonderful childishiness about much here: the story-time voices, the Bagpuss breaks, the nostalgic whimsy for an age when music was utterly free of pretensions or pensiveness. "His Majesty King Raam" and "In The Bath" serve up a warm comedy that's wry, affecting and utterly compelling. "The Staunton Lick" and "Kneel Before Your God" raise the tempo to a funky slouch. And when it's all over, you'll be left wondering whether there'll ever be room in your heart for anything else. This is essential. [+]